[Dialogue] 11/03/16, Spong/Gretta Vosper: Selling the Story

Thu Nov 3 08:16:42 PDT 2016

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As Bishop Spong continues to recover, we are pleased to have as guest author this week Gretta Vosper.

Selling the Story
Attila the None
The headlines are pretty clear. Both Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute have told us that people, especially young people, aren’t so much avoiding church as not even thinking it is relevant. In this American election year, those who identify as the Nones – people who state on census forms that they have no religious affiliation – have been declared the largest “religious” voting bloc in the country. Those seated in the pews of mainline, Protestant America can no longer assume they have the strong political voice they once did.
Denying the dead canary
In fact, In North America, Christianity is in decline in almost every sector. White Evangelicals deny the dead canary but even the numbers they can responsibly point to indicate a creeping loss of the hold they have on the hearts of the people. Young people used to leave church for a few years and return once they began their families. Now once they leave, they’re gone for good.
It’s cold up here, too.
It’s hard not to speak about American Christianity when it dominates so much of our news these past several months. But here in Canada, a country we like to believe we have won back from dark hues of evangelicalism that had been increasingly interwoven with the fiscally conservative values of our previous government, the same truths unfold. Mainline, liberal, and progressive Christianity everywhere is on the wane.
Death catches up
The immediate results are obvious. Aging congregations are no longer able to sustain historically significant church buildings. Amalgamations stave off closure for a few years as money freed up by the sale of properties temporarily refills the coffers. Membership shrinkage has, in many churches, become precipitous as death catches up with our aging demographic. In four consecutive years, all but two of the United Church of Canada congregations in my area lost over 22% of their membership.
It is true that there are some demographics the church can include that might continue its survival. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby noted a few years ago that while Canada was not becoming an irreligious nation, the religions that would thrive are the same as those that thrived in the past: congregations that reflect immigration trends. In Canada, and I expect in America as well, those are primarily Evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Muslim communities. But what of those congregations whose white, European immigrant populations are no longer reflected in newcomers to either the United States or Canada?
There is hope but you may not like it.
That ugly “market” word
Many don’t like thinking about the people they’d like to see in church as their “market”. I get that. It is a term that reeks of profit and self-preservation and, in the church, where we use careful words like “stewardship” to raise the money we need to survive, it feels ugly.
But markets are also the people who are in need of a product. In social welfare organizations, the market is not the place you look to for buyers, it’s the place you look to for clients. Social welfare organizations that do well are those with a well-defined client; they are organizations poised to offer a “product” or “service” that meets a need. Clearly, if church is losing ground so significantly, it is no longer meeting a need. But does that mean the need no longer exists or does it mean that we aren’t able to meet it anymore?
Naming the need
Really good social welfare organizations take their lead from the corporate world and actually sell the need for their services, not the service itself. You’re not likely to support organizations doing work you don’t think is needed. Raise your awareness of the need and an organization has raised the chances you’ll support it.
Christianity has been successful throughout history in the same way corporations are successful: it has sold the need for what it has to offer. It has sold the story that we’re inherently sinful people in need of salvation. Evangelicals can get that salvation through belief – distributed and reinforced by the church. Roman Catholics can get it through the sacraments – exclusively available through the church. It has worked for millennia.
But we, those of us in the middle, who have been part of the great liberal tradition in the church, we’ve run out of the story. It doesn’t work for many of us anymore and it certainly isn’t working for younger generations. We don’t believe the story that we were born in sin and neither do they. We have lost the market because we haven’t come up with a need strong enough to replace the story of salvation, strong enough to build a market that needs us. It is as simple as that.
For the last four decades, Bishop John Shelby Spong, has invited us beyond traditional Christian doctrine. He has done so by sharing his extensive knowledge of the Bible and helped us use that knowledge to struggle our way beyond the ecclesial rhetoric the church has built upon it. He has helped us recognize and cope with reality, not tempering it with a story of salvation that lets us off the hook. He made us accountable for ourselves, for what we do in the name of faith. He helped us deconstruct the god we had created and invited us to embrace an understanding of god that is decidedly non-theist. No small task within a religion focused almost exclusively on the image of a divine, omniscient being.
Many of us who have been escorted beyond belief by Bishop Spong and others who have written in this deconstructionist genre, have found ways to translate the words of the Christian story and understand it metaphorically. When we do, our new perspective lets us hear the old words with new meaning. But our children and our children’s children are not interested in translations. They’ve rejected the story. They acknowledge science, embrace reason, and struggle with the tough realities of everyday life. They believe we’re all in this together, whatever “this” is.
The “hope” part
When I speak of church attendance and religious affiliation without slides, I have to “be” the graphic illustration. I use my arms to share the general direction of the statistics. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to draw the graph of the decline of church attendance in your mind. One arm starts high pointing up toward where the wall and ceiling meet; the other points gradually down from shoulder to elbow and then drops toward the floor. It’s an easy thing to get: decline, decline, disaster.
Flip the graph
But any graph of statistics can be read upside down. The dot that shows you how many people are making under $50,000/year is also showing you how many people are making over $50,000/year, assuming you know how many people you’re counting. A graph that shows you precipitous decline in the number of people attending church is also showing you precipitous increase in the number of people not going to church. Flip the graph and there’s your market.
The “you may not like it” part
We have two legitimate choices.
1) Call it a day
I’m serious. If we have nothing to offer then we should enjoy the translations we make, the people we know, the liturgies that enrich our lives and allow them to slowly cease to be, acknowledging as we do, that the need we were meant to serve no longer exists. It is a very clean choice and one that I imagine many will embrace. Bishop Spong argues that Christianity, without bold changes should die. He’s right.
But you could also ….
2) Find the need and write the story to tell it
Again, I’m serious. I know you’re tired and you’ve tried everything, but I’m not finished yet. There is a need out there that I have become convinced is enormous. And it is something we know and know well.
There is a need for hope. Not a magical, “lift my eyes to the mountains” kind of hope. Bishop Spong would preach that idea of hope down in a second. I mean a hope that is built in human relationship, a hope that grows in strength and power as human relationships grow in integrity and love, a hope that kindles our desires to create the goodness the world needs and provides us the energy and passion to bring it about. I mean hope in you and me. We are not gods; we cannot promise that good will out. But we are the potential for good and we can inspire one another to greatness.
It takes work. Believe me.
Both of these options take work. The first takes the work of grieving the loss of something that was once great, holding one another as you watch it die, and offering up an interwoven celebration and lament – the best kind of death you could wish for.
The second takes muscle and tears, creativity and goodbyes. You need to remove every barrier to participation that exists and they are legion – almost everything you say, sing, or do will need to be assessed. And then you need to create of the dust that’s left, everything that builds well-being, edifies and convicts (yes, we will still need to name, acknowledge, and address the bad choices we have made), and invites right-relationship with oneself, others, including the global community, and the planet. It takes your everything. But it is totally worth it.
Who we are
West Hill United Church is a congregation that has learned to lean into the work of creating hope in our personal lives and in the world without the traditional language of Christian faith. We’ve taken Bishop Spong’s work to heart and built something new upon it – a community steeped in the costly values that undergird his theology without depending on that theology to support it. We build, confident that hope, life, love all require those same values, that same cost, and we pour our lives out as we live it.
The cost
The work has already cost us our Christian language, our favourite hymns, our holy book, and our all-powerful god. It forced from us a new story, one that we now tell with new images and metaphors, with courage and strength. We’re telling the story of how together, we can change ourselves, our relationships, the world. We are telling the story of hope, of the need for well-being, and for the gifts of community. That story, that new story has had a powerful effect on those who, until now, have felt that church is not for them.
It might cost me my ordination. My denomination doesn’t like that I can’t describe my idea of god with the words “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”; I’m currently facing “defrocking”. Bishop Spong has been an incredible personal support during this time and spoke out boldly to the leaders of the United Church who undertook this process.
It might cost West Hill its identity as a United Church of Canada congregation, membership in a denomination that has, until now, been on the forefront of progressive change in the churches of the world. Those losses will be sad ones.
The story
But the story we have told and the need we work to meet has built a congregation composed almost entirely of people who could not ever translate the Christian language or can no more, for whom the old story was a stumbling block, who do not believe in the magical power of prayer or that all goodness comes from an omni-powerful deity. Stripped of the supernatural narrative, we find ourselves engaged in the work of creating the goodness the world needs and we encourage one another in that work. To encourage is to give hope.
The root word of encourage is the French word for heart – coeur. We hold one another in our hearts and find there, that our need for hope is both raised and met.
~Gretta Vosper
About the Author:
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers.
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Leif from Jackson, New Hampshire writes:

Question:
How do we know when God is speaking to us?
Answer:
Dear Leif,
Someone once observed that "When I speak to God, it is called prayer. When God speaks to me it is called paranoia." That may be a bit jaundiced but it has a germ of truth in it.
When people say to me that God has spoken to them, I get nervous. God was said to have spoken through a dog to the one known as "The Son of Sam" and told him to kill women in New York City about two decades ago. God was said to have spoken to the terrorists and told them to kill Americans on September 11, 2001.
There is far too much subjectivity in such pious talk. But if God is conceived of after the analogy of Life, Love and Being then any actions which enhance life, increase love and expand being can be said to be a response to God. That is as far as I want to go.
~John Shelby Spong

Read and Share Online Here

Announcements

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